"Get your clothes off," I tell him, still shaking. "Now."
He strips with the same unhurried efficiency he applies to everything — dark leathers, the linen shirt underneath — and I see him fully for the first time. Charcoal skin over hard, broad muscle, thin scars crisscrossing his torso, and the considerable, thick length of his cock standing heavy against his stomach. I stare, and he lets me stare, and then he settles his weight over me and I feel every inch of the size difference between us — the breadth of his shoulders, the way his body cages mine, the heat of his skin against my bare chest.
I wrap my hand around him and stroke, and the sound he makes — low, strained, barely controlled — is the most human thing I've ever heard from him. His hips push into my grip, his jaw tight, and for one satisfying moment the composed, patient, infuriatingly stoic Keeper of the Wild Hunt is undone by my fist around his cock.
"Inside me," I say against his mouth. "Now. I'm done waiting."
He notches himself at my entrance and pushes in slowly — all the way, one long relentless stroke that stretches me open around the thick length of him until I'm gasping, nails scoringdown his back, and he groans against my temple in a sound that vibrates through my chest.
"Fuck, you're tight." Rough. Almost reverent. His hand grips my hip hard enough to bruise.
"Move," I demand, and he does.
He fucks me deep and measured, each thrust grinding the base of his cock against my clit, and the patience of it is maddening — the slow, thorough authority of this man who sets the pace and keeps it regardless of how loudly I beg for more. I dig my heels into the backs of his thighs and pull him deeper, and he groans and gives me what I'm asking for — harder, the sound of our bodies meeting filling the cabin alongside the storm.
"Harder," I gasp. "Rolin — harder —"
He hooks my knee over his arm, changes the angle, and drives into me so deep my vision whites. I cry out, back bowing, and he doesn't stop — just keeps that devastating rhythm, watching my face, watching my breasts move with every thrust, watching me come apart beneath him with those burning amber eyes.
"That's it." His voice is wrecked. "Take all of it."
I shatter. It rolls through me in a wave that locks my thighs around his hips and drags his name out of me in a broken scream, and he follows two thrusts later — burying himself deep, his forehead pressed to mine, his groan low and honest and nothing like a man accustomed to being this undone.
Afterward. Fire burning low. Rain still hammering the roof. His arm across my waist, heavy and warm.
"I didn't think I'd want to stay," I say quietly. "In Briarhollow. I came here to sell the land and leave."
A long silence. Then, very quietly: "You make me want things I stopped counting on."
"What kind of things?"
His eyes find mine in the dark. "A future."
I take his scarred hand where it rests between us and hold it, and outside the storm runs its full length, and neither of us says anything else for a long while, and it's enough.
8
ROLIN
The stag is gone by the second morning.
I know before I reach the grove. The bond tells me. A sudden absence where there should be presence, a specific silence that has nothing in common with ordinary quiet. Sacred creatures don't simply leave the deep territory. They don't migrate. They don't seek out the settlement edge on their own. They go where the bond holds them, and the bond has never been broken.
Until now.
The grove is wrecked. Brush crushed flat, bark stripped from two of the oldest tiphe trees by something large and frantic. The ground tells the story in ugly detail — boot prints, trap drag marks, the wheel score of a cart. Multiple men. They'd been prepared for the size and the fight, and they'd brought enough equipment to manage both.
I stop in the ruined grove and feel the deity's rage move through the bond like a current through still water, and I need a moment before I can function past it.
This is the thing I have been afraid of. The specific thing, the one that puts a shape to every formless dread I have carriedall these years. Not the slow deterioration. Not the gradual weakening of the barrier. This — a direct, deliberate violation of the most sacred creature in the territory, taken for profit by people who looked at something ancient and irreplaceable and saw only a price.
I leave for the orchard. I try to justify that it's because the boundary needs checking.
Sybil isat the south row when I arrive, doing something focused and morning-efficient to the trees that survived Celia's poisoning. She looks up when she sees me, and something in my face must communicate the situation before I speak, because hers goes serious immediately.
"Tell me," she says.
I tell her. The grove. The tracks. What it means for the barrier.
